Coming Home

Instead of worrying about what he believes should be the direction of the nation's largest Jewish denomination, Rabbi David Ellenson laughs, preferring to tell stories about growing up in Newport News. With a best friend, Robert "Bobby" Hatten, and a former college professor, James Livingston, at each side, the men exchange memories of a Rockwellian city on the Virginia Peninsula. Kids played without concern of sniper bullets. Parents didn't sweat about Amber alerts to signal abducted children. And a family's doors were always open to a neighbor.

Ellenson recalls a trip down to Louisville to speak at Lexington Theology Seminary where he got a basketball autographed by then-Kentucky University basketball coach Rick Pitino and the Wildcat team.

FOR THE RECORD - Published correction ran Tuesday, October 22, 2002.A story in the Oct. 13 Life section incorrectly spelled the name of the Stuart Gardens section of Newport News. (Text corrected.)

An avid basketball fan, the ball was his compensation for the trip.

Today, Ellenson, 53, will be inaugurated as president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the nation's oldest place of Jewish higher learning.

With campuses in New York, Los Angeles, Jerusalem and Cincinnati, the university's presidency is among the most recognized positions in Reform Judaism. Its founder, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, is known as the architect of the American Reform movement.

Ellenson, in charge of the seminary that sends Reform rabbis to more than 223 congregations throughout North America, has the potential of shaping the public face of Judaism in America.

World leaders of the Reform movement, as well as members of other faiths, will attend the inauguration, a result of a more than a year's worth of scheduling. Ellenson began his presidency in June 2001.

In the days leading up to his inauguration in Cincinnati, Ellenson took a break to return to the place of his boyhood.

"I know that Thomas Wolfe said that you can't go home again, but that's not entirely the case," Ellenson says to family and friends. "This is truly the place where I was formed."

Ellenson's family, Orthodox Jews, and the Hattens, Southern Baptists, were neighbors in Stuart Gardens in the East End of Newport News, where their sons were best buddies. At times, as kids, they visited each other's congregations.

Little David and little Bobby, attorney Robert C. Hatten, who's been co-counsel representing shipyard workers in more than 10,000 asbestos product-liability suits since 1975 -- spent afternoons playing baseball at the park in Stuart Gardens.

While Bobby bested David when it came to hurling fastballs across home plate, when their competition came to reading summer books, biographies of great Americans, Ellenson threw strikes. Both boys knew it.

"You'll be president, and I'll be your secretary of state," Hatten says he'd tell his boyhood friend. Like Eisenhower to Dulles. Bush to Powell.

"And now he is a president," says Livingston, former religion department head at Ellenson's alma mater, The College of William and Mary.

Ellenson joked about his presidency, tacking his name to the list of other elected leaders connected to the Williamsburg institution: Jefferson, Monroe and Tyler.

"And now Ellenson," he adds, at a luncheon at Temple Sinai, a reform congregation in Newport News.

It is a slight overstatement, but only slight.

This hometown boy made good has been on short lists of advisers to President George W. Bush on international issues.

As head of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, he speaks to a potential audience of 1.5 million Reform Jews.

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Shortly before Ellenson became president of the college, a May 2001 issue of The Forward, a notable Jewish magazine, described him as lacking administrative and fund-raising experience needed to head an institution.

It is a critique that even his younger brother, James, admits he wondered about.

Nine years apart, the Ellenson brothers contrast one another.

James, he says, takes after his father, a strong, vocal man who died at 55, soon after being diagnosed with ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

David's alignment was to his mom.

In 1983, Rosalind Ellenson headed Hampton's Department of Social Services after 18 years of work with the department. As an administrator, her work on behalf of the elderly helped to focus Virginia's attention toward that issue. At the time of her death in 1989, colleagues described their friend as being "always real positive" and filled with compassion.

"She ran a very efficient Social Services operation, yet with compassion for the people in need," said Robert J. O'Neill Jr., then-Hampton city manager.

"That's who she was," James Ellenson says of their mother.

"She had more influence on my brother than my father did.

"So when David was named president of the college, I wondered about it," James says, "whether in all his saintliness what he'd do, because as a college president, there are times you have to kick some ass, and I didn't know if he had that forcefulness needed in that job."

But the combination of a passion for social change and a stealth resolve was also the secret to their mother's success.